The League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Our mission is to acknowledge, foster, and support thoughtful, articulate, and creative blogs built on an appreciation of the horror and sci-horror genres.

Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals, from all walks of life, who keep the genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long hours to keep their blogs informative and fun, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality, culture and knowledge freely to fans of a genre difficult to describe, and fun to fear.

We honor exemplary horror blogs with our own special insignia: one that signifies the heights to which we aspire, and the code of excellence we follow to promote horror in all its wonderfully frightening forms, from classic to contemporary, from philosophical to schlockical.

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers are bloggers who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging to reach the heights of horrifying excellence. We know what rapture it is to sip tana tea in the full moon light, and feel the thrill of walking the dark passageways in cinema and literature, searching for the unusual, the terrifying, and the monstrous. For the fun of it.

Keep watching the skies, and reading the horror. LOTT D is coming for you!

--jmcozzoli, Zombos' Closet of Horror

May 7, 2009

LOTT D Horror Roundup III

Howdy Horror Groupies! Kick up those heels and bang those drums, it's time for another month's worth of favorite posts from the notorious LOTT D disco of doom. They're lined up and waiting for you...but be careful, those leopard skins itch like hell!

Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire heads to Home Depot to look at Hardware:

"Richard Stanley'sHardware is an offering that couldn't have been made in any year other than 1990. It crystallizes the Industrial/Cyberpunk aesthetic into a meticulously-realized and unique post-apocalyptic world."

"Cheng Pei Pei was a formal dancer who Shaw Brother’s actor, set designer, and eventually director, King Hu, cast as the master sword fighter Golden Swallow in the groundbreaking film Come Drink With Me. She was most recently known as Chow Yun Fat’s antagonist Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Evil on Two Legs catches up with Pathogen and speaks with the very young, micro-budget, director Emily Hagins:

"if viewed in the proper context, as a low-budget film with plenty of rough edges but even more heart and campy fun, most horror fans will find it hard not to enjoy pathogen. particularly those with an interest in what it takes to make a film, on both a technical level and in terms of personal determination and tenacity."

Horrors Not Dead asks Is The Strangers the Most Effective Horror Movie Since Blair Witch?"

"It wasn’t until this past Saturday that I fully realized just how strong of a film The Strangers (review)is. Seeing it in theaters elicited seat stirring and all manner of other audible audience discomfort, but seeing it in a home theater was an entirely different experience."

"The cleverness of closeted text is that each layer of meaning was simultaneously functional. You didn't need to grok the queer subtext to puzzle together the straight meaning of the work. I bring up this possibly antiquated critical term because... The Midnight Meat Train, seems to me to be a closeted text."

"I realize that the movie has been out for a while and that a number of reviews and commentary have been posted, but given the focus of this blog I may have something to contribute as I touch on aspects of Romero’s continuing social and cultural critique 40 years after his groundbreaking classic Night of the Living Dead (1968)."

"The perceived rise in popularity of the zombie has been slow and steady, not sudden like Grossman suggests. We have indeed been inundated with zombies in a variety of mediums over the past two years or so; but this trend began years ago. Zombies have always been popular in video games (Resident Evil), and with Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002 and Zach Snyder’s re-imagining of Dawn of the Dead in 2004, zombies began their slow, lumbering climb to the top nearly a half decade ago. It didn’t come out of nowhere, it just took a while to gain the level of popularity it holds today. With the recent success of World War Z, zombies are poised to take over the literary world as well."

7 comments:

I really enjoyed I Love Horror's entry on Time Magazine's postulate that Zombies are the New Vampires though I disagree with the Time's article.

Looking at their folkloric roots, some would say the difference between these two creatures is minimal. They’re both dead, though zombies announce the fact far more openly with their rotted bodies and pesky need for human flesh and they each want to consume us in their own way.

But the main difference between vampires and zombies is that literature succeeded in turning the vampire into an elite aristocrat (a metaphor for the corruption of the upper class) in a way the zombie has never been utilized. I wonder how Pride & Prejudice & Zombies might challenge or reaffirm the role relegated to zombies in the culture of horror.

I personally think that vampires have been more or less ruined by Hollywood. What with the fey, posturing emo-types of 'Twilight' and such, they've kinda lost much of their appeal; over-romanticised, perhaps (a '30 Days of Night' portrayal works well... but isn't seen nearly enough to become the standard).

Zombies, on the other hand, can't be romanticised. They're scary because of their simplicity and because they don't go all emo and sparkly and shit.

Cool site. I have to say, though, the post comparing THE STRANGERS to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT caught me off guard. I think both of the movies are pretty ineffective. But, my tastes are not exactly... good?? I mean, I can't stand BLAIR WITCH, but I love its sequel.